Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

> NTP scientists had exposed thousands of rats and mice ... to doses of radiation equivalent to an average mobile user’s lifetime exposure.

Misleading. From the study:

> Rats were exposed to ... whole-body SAR exposures of 0, 1.5, 3, or 6 W/kg

The lowest exposure they tested was equivalent to an average person (80kg in North America, evidently) standing right in front of the antenna of a 120W transmitter 24/7.

View on HN

Well, they had to jack it up because the experiment (and the rats) would not go on for seventy years. And if the mechanism of action is anything like other types of radiation, risk is proportional to total lifetime exposure, not peak exposure.

> And if the mechanism of action is anything like other types of radiation,

And if the mechanism is mocrowave heating, then power density driven heating rate is the first order effect.

Which 'if' is it? Perhaps neither of the above.

That's the "linear-no-threshold" model (LNT) and I see no attempt to show that it holds here. They jumped straight to exposures thousands of times higher than typical heavy use, which smells like they were fishing for a positive result.

LNT is a theory of ionizing radiation, and while your overall point is salient, the reference to LNT is not. While many things enjoy a similar exposure model, LNT is a specific term.

Is there a generic term that captures the same idea? If there is, I'd like to use it.

Nah, jacking it up has its own new set of problems. Cellphone radiation isn't ionizing radiation, at most you're ever so slightly heating cells around it. By increasing the intensity you might be literally baking and killing cells in the process (think the difference between drinking a scalding beverage and burning the shit out of your mouth vs. letting it cool and not being injured or having the cells get killed off).

Now take my hot beverage example and repeat it a bunch of times. I would bet that cancer incidence would increase in the scalding group. (as you're destroying epithelial cells and forcing them to regenerate... and cancer is really biological lotto).

To top all the above off. With the exception of the migration from GSM to WCDMA technology (GSM pulsed the radio), cell phone radio output power has actually been on the decline due to smaller cells sizes being used in cities. It's nothing like using an analog cellphone in the 80's was in terms of output.

This is an even better analogy than it appears at face value, because hot beverages "probably" cause cancer according to the WHO:

https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/world-health-organization...

To your last point - individual radio power has declined but I’d suspect that the total exposure has gone up because 1)Device density is far greater and 2)Time spent transmitting is longer per device because we use more data now than in years past.

As to whether that causes cancer, I’m not an expert... I guess the ultimate measure will be actual cancer incidence rates but by that point, isn’t it arguably too late for many of us?

Power drops off with distance squared. Device density increases background levels, but this study wasn’t looking at background levels; time spent transmitting per device is up but the location of that transmission is no longer right up against your head, just your hands.

I’d love to see a study about background EM exposure in the various EM spectrum bands that are now in continuous use in urban environments. But it would be very hard to run such a study!

>I’d love to see a study about background EM exposure in the various EM spectrum bands that are now in continuous use in urban environments. But it would be very hard to run such a study!

While that study would be tricky, I can think of devising a study in which rural cellphone users are compared to urban ones. You'd have to control for things like wifi calling and outliers with a tower next to their house but in theory background EM from base towers will be lower in the rural area, while at the same time output power from the mobile will be higher (because further from base station).

Honestly though, nothing is going to compare to the EM radiation of the Sun. It's like asking if hearing whispering will cause hearing damage while someone is screaming next to you. So, yeah I guess... hard to control. (this is why I only bring up user equipment exposure since it's placed inches from the skin, I think it's silly to worry about cancer from base stations)

Do we know unequivocally that cell phone radiation never has the same effect as ionizing radiation, or that none whatsoever is produced? What if, just for example, while the average particle/wave is in the radio frequencies, there was some minuscule far-UV or Xray spectral components?

Certainly by first principals of what we know, cell phone radiation should be harmless. But there's always the possibility we don't know something important yet, and given cellular radio's omnipresence, I figure it's worth humoring that possibility.

As for power output, I'm not a modem engineer but it sounds like GSM -> 3G -> 4G has progressively reduced power requirements by improving SNR & playing other tricks. Whereas with 5G, on the surface it sounds like the plan to increase bandwidth & performance is "take 4G and jack the frequency & power", so it's kind of the other direction and then makes sense why so many people are asking questions compared to the rollout of 3G or 4G.

Cell phone radiation is not ionizing so I don’t understand which effects you are referring too if you mean ionizing a DNA molecule then no it cannot do that.

My example is pretty simple. An antenna does not radiate only 900MHz. It radiates a distribution, centered around 900MHz. The fall-off is rapid, but there is non-zero power at higher frequencies, and there can also be harmonics. It's just an example, but the point is there could be some hidden effect we're not considering or aware of. It would hardly be the first time we thought we had it all figured out, and whoa hey there, we didn't expect that to happen.

While the antenna doesn’t radiate a single frequency it doesn’t radiate ionizing radiation at any frequency.

There can be plenty of “hidden” effects for non-ionizing radiation for example we don’t know how the extra energy affects the molecular processes in cells you don’t have to ionize something to fuck things up a microwave would cook an egg without ever ionizing it’s molecules.

This is true if you believe in the LNT (Linear No Threshold) model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

Then check out the idea of Radiation Hormesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

It's an interesting idea.

Both LNT and hormesis are talking about ionizing radiation and so don’t apply here. Hormesis is unlikely to be true anyway though.

5G towers are going to be much closer to more people (every 300 meters or so, I believe) to deliver those 1+ Gbps speeds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com